These essays by one of America's foremost historians of art and architecture range over theory and criticism, the search for connections between art and science in the Renaissance, and specific works of Renaissance architecture. The largest group of essays, dealing with the character of Renaissance architecture, are models of art historical scholarship in their direct approach to identifying the essentials of a building and the social and intellectual context in which they should be viewed. Another group of essays explores encounters between the traditions of artistic practice and early optics and color theory. The three essays that begin this collection bring to light the intellectual and moral concerns that underlie all of Ackerman's art historical work.

Soon after her husband's tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin's secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she'd worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. Margo Orlando Littell, author of Each Vagabond by Name, tells an enthralling and nuanced story about family, womanhood, and coming to terms with a left-behind past.

This is a monograph on fixed point theory, covering the purely metric aspects of the theory–particularly results that do not depend on any algebraic structure of the underlying space. Traditionally, a large body of metric fixed point theory has been couched in a functional analytic framework. This aspect of the theory has been written about extensively. There are four classical fixed point theorems against which metric extensions are usually checked. These are, respectively, the Banach contraction mapping principal, Nadler’s well known set-valued extension of that theorem, the extension of Banach’s theorem to nonexpansive mappings, and Caristi’s theorem. These comparisons form a significant component of this book. This book is divided into three parts. Part I contains some aspects of the purely metric theory, especially Caristi’s theorem and a few of its many extensions. There is also a discussion of nonexpansive mappings, viewed in the context of logical foundations. Part I also contains certain results in hyperconvex metric spaces and ultrametric spaces. Part II treats fixed point theory in classes of spaces which, in addition to having a metric structure, also have geometric structure. These specifically include the geodesic spaces, length spaces and CAT(0) spaces. Part III focuses on distance spaces that are not necessarily metric. These include certain distance spaces which lie strictly between the class of semimetric spaces and the class of metric spaces, in that they satisfy relaxed versions of the triangle inequality, as well as other spaces whose distance properties do not fully satisfy the metric axioms.